Turn
your
lantern
face-up and
turn your face up and
see the whirling constellations
of snowflakes. Do not raise your
hood—let each lost and fallen one melt
in the forest of your hair. Do not close your
eyes—let snow melt also into those boiling salt
sinks. Stare and squint across snow and ice at warm
windowlights and know they aren’t welcoming you, they
won’t take you, so just stay here, feel ice creep through your
eyebrows, feel your ears turn red and then blue, listen to the living
lake’s woodblock adjustments, lift your eyes, just for one yawning
moment, and look to the hemlock bank, its moonlit checkerboard of snow-
flexed branches, and then turn the lantern, turn your gaze down and dig, dig as deep
as you can, bury your eyes in the layers of what falls, has fallen, will keep on keep on keep on
falling.
Isaac Fox is an English and creative writing major at Lebanon Valley College. When he’s not reading or writing something assigned, he’s probably reading or writing something unassigned. His work has previously appeared in Tiny Molecules, Rejection Letters, and several other publications.
Twitter: @isaac_k_fox
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